September 2007

Get a bunch of drunk and high people to meet somewhere on a freezing cold beach.
This will be difficult as everyone is drunk and high. Parking is hard to find too. Make sure everyone is calling each other on cell phones asking someone who isn’teven invited to the bonfire “where the trail is to the fire, man.”After 20 minutes lost in sand dunes, you’ll be ready to get started. Then, have everyone look at each other and ask who brought wood.

No one will have.

Scavenge up and down the beach until finally resorting to burning the garbage from a beach house trash can. Only after its too late will you realize you’re burning a filled diaper and tampons. Then, because you’ve picked the coldest possible day to be on a beach, all start shivering. For fun, get sand all over the lips of your wine and beer bottles and complain about it.

There will always be some overly perky girl who demands to swim in the water. Let her. She needs to learn the hard way that hypothermia is real and that those same guys who were just hitting on her will forget her immediately when she is a briney, shivering, sand encrusted mess.

As the night winds down and the overweight drunk guy falls asleep too close to the fire and singes his eyebrows off, you’ll know that you’ve had a successful Beach Bonfire!

(This is not the blog I thought I would be writing today – I had already come so close to finishing one on Library Kink…so coming soon!!!!!)

The greatness of Superman comics is pretty great.

I like to think about it in relation to two things. First, there is the obvious Nietzsche reference that is always accessible, just in case you get bored with the actual plot. And then, there is always always all of the BIPOLARS who fly around all the time as if they are Superman – coming to save you and love you and make you feel safe, and then you do the whole “There was nothing he couldn’t do and he was gonna take me, LaLa LaLa, with him” but when they transform into their alter ego you do not get the sweet, dorky Clark Kent at all… YOU GET BIZARRO! (Although you never really knew if it was Bizarro or Superman who seduced you in the first place, but irregardless, it worked.) He starts saying things like “Me like tough girl. Maybe you be my queen when me am King of the Earth,” and it certainly seems questionable, but he was Superman last time you checked, and you were so stunned to be in the presence of such a creature in the first place that it wasn’t like you could expect things to ever make sense anyway.

But then, it becomes, “Me did understand. Me still opposite of you, but not the way you think — you stupid, me smart. You weak, me powerful! You am servant of the world, me be its master!” – and then you’re like “FUCK! so that’s what happened! i couldn’t quite figure it out, but i finally got it!”

On October 31, 2007, PETA announced they received enough signatures to get on ballots in every State in the 2008 US Federal election. They fielded 100 candidates for Senate and 532 for the House. PETA — who had been secretly drilling for oil in Alaska and had enough money to cover the Statue of Liberty in 1000 dollar bills — hired a top notch campaign staff, composed of such notables as Karl Rove, Rupert Murdock, Pat Sajak, Barry Bonds and Noam Chomsky.

This PETA campaign staff utilized fear tactics:

exclaiming the evils of eating meat as murderous, environmentally unsustainable, and cancerous

stating in a national press conference that the obvious, logical step and ultimate dogmatic goal of Neocons and the Democrat National Committee is cannibalism.

PETA did well in these elections, beating Democrats and Republicans for 58 Senate seats and 293 House seats.

Over the next four years, the new political majority proceeded to enact laws that banned meat eating in America. Soon after, a worldwide ban was enacted by the United Nations.

20 years later.

In a Rapid City middle school history class, underweight eleven year old Sharon Nyes learned that humans used to eat meat. It was listed under the heading, “Evils of World History”, ranking second place between Christianity and the World Bank [see the movie Zeitgeist], ahead of Nazism and capitalism.

Sharon had never heard of eating meat. She knew she was supposed to be terrified, but for some reason her mouth began to water. On her way home, she slumped to the ground, victimized by the recurring images of that day’s lesson and the hungry growling in her stomach.
“What am I becoming? My God, what am I becoming?” she wept.

A week later, she was crouched over a flying electric car air-road killed condor, looking at the bright colors of entrails.

Her palms clammy, and her mouth watering.

As she ellipsed her mouth for a bite, the thought police — who embed microchips in all humans brains during the second trimester — arrested her on the spot. She was executed ten minutes later at 6:42am, March 18th, 2028.

That afternoon, PETA officials — who had succumbed to the scrumptious pleasures of unadulterated power — enjoyed a Thai delicacy that evening: coconut curried fresh girl with basil and pine nuts.

I am in the midst of creating a hypothetical system tentatively called Fictive Religion.
Without any experience in putting a worldview in clear words, I will try to explain some of the characteristics of Fictive Religion.
1) It is fictive in that it is actively, purposefully created and adapted continuously by the practioner. It is openly “unreal” and a spirit of unattachment is nurtured so that one’s fiction never becomes a egoist trap.
2) it is religious in the sense that it involves others in a meaningful, vulnerable way concerning the most important concerns of our lives. A sharing community of story is created where true equality can meet to address concerns both existential and utterly practical.

Some markers of a healthy Fictive Religion would be:
1) Its attraction and meaningfulness to those whose stories are under represented, those who are exploited or in any way kept from their fullest potential.
2) Its ability to inspire the incarnation of the story. Star Wars, Harry Potter, and
Lord Of The Rings have shown to be mighty good at this. So has Catholicism when its members are arrested for peacefully protesting injustice, or Quakerism when its members peacefully combat violence. In short, does it inspire towards action?
3) It will inspire and fulfill the storyteller while increasing their perspective, deepening their sense of community responsibility, and opening them to embracing a life adventure that can be fearful.

Of course there will be completely novel inventions of ‘new myths’ and ‘personal spiritual narratives’ that have no connection to previous expressions, but this is not necessarily so.
Fictive Religion would exist for Christians and Muslims and anyone who was drawn to the motifs and characters of one system but felt more comfortable recognising it as a Fictive creation.

Fictive Religion is occurring all the time, and has always, and some will say that it is all that has ever occurred (despite what others say).
I encourage feedback to help me wrangle this idea.
Ryan McGivern

Summer Olympics 2008 will be held in China and the world is so excited!
What is not getting as much media attention is the
Animal Olympics which will be held in Sweden this November 11th through the 25th.

Of course, with every wonderful event of world unity, there will be detractors.

There have already been a number of protesters who have called for a halting of
Animal Olympics because they feel it is too soon after the Munich Animal Olympics.

Last year, four iguanas were killed when extremist sloths raided the Reptile Hut.

“We need to make sure security improvements have been made. It is simply a matter
of good sense.” Said a squid who is protesting the Winter Games in Sweden this year.
The squid had been slated to fight a submarine in a battle to the death, “but with the horrors of Munich hanging over our heads, I feel my participation would not be in good taste.”

Organizers are answering the criticisms with confidence.
“We’re ready this year. Security measures have been made.” Said Bubbu, a Jack Russell Terrier in charge of bomb sniffing. “Believe me when I tell you that the only killing we’ll see this year in Sweden, is the money made at the beer garden.”

The good news is this movie tested very well.
The bad news is the test audience was entirely mindless growling zombies.

A few rows in front of me were a group of teen aged boys (supposedly the target audience) and they listlessly took in the length of the movie before unhappily shuffling out of the theatre.
People Who Make Movies: Listen to me. Zombie movies are not hard.
There are really only three ingredients you need
1) a shotgun
2) a heroic character who unfortunately gets bit and dutifully sacrifices him or herself
3) a bunch of snarling flesh eating zombies.

This movie that these three ingredients (but barely) and didn’t mind to include anything else of any worth whatsoever. One also must wonder where the title comes from. Does anyone know what ‘extinction’ means?
Alternate titles I would offer would be:
Resident Evil-Barely Attention Gathering Even If Stoned
Resident Evil-Kinda Like Every Other Movie That You Hate
Resident Evil-Better Than Watching Women’s Golf

Milla Jovovich is an angel who in this movie just looks like she’s fallen from grace and must reside in a sophmoric, coked out writer’s second draft. Milla, I love you and I have a script written just for you. It involves a shotgun, a heroic bitten character, and a bunch of zombies. I wrote it in a half hour over a six pack of Newcastle, and I guarantee it will be 8 times better than ‘Extinction’.

Maybe the movie was effective to some degree.
It did make me want to eat the eyeballs out of my head.

Final Word: Resident Evil Extinction is to movies
what the pinky finger is to ‘the shocker’.